


we have lost even this twilight

by phantomlistener



Category: The Hour
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 06:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1256392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantomlistener/pseuds/phantomlistener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Four days after he's discovered dumped outside Lime Grove Studios, Frederick Lyon dies in hospital.  Two days after that, Lix Storm packs a bag (clothes, camera, passport) and gets on a boat to Spain."</p>
            </blockquote>





	we have lost even this twilight

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Pablo Neruda's [Clenched Soul](http://allpoetry.com/poem/8496959-Clenched-Soul-by-Pablo-Neruda), which fits Randall and Lix heartbreakingly well.

Four days after he's discovered dumped outside Lime Grove Studios, Frederick Lyon dies in hospital.

Two days after that, Lix Storm packs a bag (clothes, camera, passport) and gets on a boat to Spain.

The crossing is terrible but she endures it like a woman possessed, exuding the calmness of too much whiskey drunk in too little time, her hands steady with the comforting weight of her latest cigarette, and by the time the ferry docks in Valencia she can half convince herself that the past week has been a simple nightmare.  By the time she finds a hotel, the evening chill has seeped through the protective cocktail in her veins right to to her bones.  The streets are both familiar and alien, the background chatter of foreign voices an unsettling counterpoint to her thoughts.  Convincing the recepcionista that she is both respectable and able to pay her way is a test on her rusty Spanish, but eventually she's handed a set of keys and pointed towards the stairs.

The paint on the walls is flaking, the bannister shaky as she reaches for its support and she pulls a hip flask from her bag, taking a gulp as she reaches the first floor.   Two more to go, she thinks, and runs a nail underneath a loose patch of paint.  It falls to the floor and shatters on impact, leaving an empty area of plaster deathly pale against the dark red of the walls.

She moves on quickly, and by the time she reaches the third floor her flask is empty - all the more incentive to reach her room and unpack her small bag, more than half full of paper bag-wrapped bottles.

The room is small, the distilled essence of every cheap hotel room in every cheap hotel, but even the air smells different, foreign, the breeze warmer and gentler than any in England, and the tiny balcony gives her a god's view over the rooftops of Valencia.  

It will do, she decides.

A week passes, minute by minute, slow and deliberate in a blur of moments.  She doesn't eat, lives on a cocktail of whiskey and nicotine, and is barely surprised as the strength seeps out of her tired body day after day.  There are ghosts everywhere, after all, leeching life wherever they lay themselves down.

It's a Sunday (church bells, morning mass, time to confess her sins) when she finally gives in to the urge that's been haunting her since she arrived.

Her hand shakes as she picks up the phone, head spinning with grief and too much alcohol, and traces the possibility of a familiar number with uncertain fingers.  Time has dissolved into one neverending moment, and she is hazily unsure of whether it's been days or weeks since she left.

"Hammersmith 3410," says the man on the other end, and it's his voice, so familiar that her breath catches in the back of her throat.  For a few seconds, her hand hovers over the cradle, ready to end the call, but the promise of those two words holds her back.

"Randall?"  Her voice is hoarse with tears and the enforced silence of so much time alone.

An indrawn breath on the other end of the line.  "Lix?"

What's supposed to be speech is torn from her mouth as a stifled sob.

"Just tell me where you are, Lix, and I'll be there.  I promise."  He hesitates, the worry a catch in his throat, barely noticeable to anybody else but she knows him, knows him like a second skin, a second self.  She misses nothing.  "Don't hang up, Lix.  Talk to me."

She breathes a sigh of smoke that curls up to the yellow-stained ceiling, whispers an apology into the handset: "I can't."

"Where are you?"  he repeats, an edge of desperation creeping into his voice.  " _Lix_."

The dialling tone is harsh in her ear when she puts the telephone down.  He's a journalist at heart (chase the story, follow the trail) and he'll find her if she stays here, no question about it.

She should never have telephoned him.

She wants him here.

The contradictions eat at her stomach and she can hardly breathe, gasping for air as snatches of Spanish conversation drift in through the open windows.  All that's missing are the gunshots (getting closer, Miss Storm, shouldn't we leave?) and the screams of the dying, fading away into choked moans and silence.

Her hands won't stop shaking.

The first glass of whiskey settles her stomach; the fourth dispels the faint echoes of gunfire; the eighth reduces the cries of the dying back down to whispers of conversation on the breeze.  She works her way through until the bottle is empty, trembling hands spilling it onto the sheets as she pours.  Eventually, the glass falls from her hand, shatters on the floor.  Half aware, she closes her eyes against the soft moonlight, opens them again against the parade of the dead that greet her in the darkness (Freddie, Sofia, half a country's youth fallen undignified like animals in the streets) and stares at the ceiling.  The room spins around the fixed mass of her body, orbiting her star in a sickening rhythm.  Her eyes drift closed.

She dreams of the dead.

People in the street startle her awake; the reflexive attempt to sit up is a dizzying swirl of nausea and limbs made heavy by alcohol, and she falls back on to the bed with a groan.  She's too old for this, for the harsh reality of sobriety hammering relentlessly into her skull, too old to be anything other than what she is.  

Alone.

What if he doesn't come?

She reaches out a questing hand for the telephone before she considers her actions, Randall's number forming easily beneath her fingers, and it rings once before he picks up: "Lix?"

She tries for flippancy, but it comes out as a weary sort ofdesperation, words for the sake of speaking, and even the effort of that hurts her head.  "Don't tell me.  You have an entire harem of women liable to call you at half past two in the morning."

A breath, exhaled in response, indicates amusement beneath the worry.  "Just you, Lix.  Just you."

"Mmmm.  Well."  The whiskey has jumbled her thoughts, made the process of matching idea and word a slow-moving struggle, and she frowns.  "I take it you found out where I am?"

"You know me too well."

"Then...."  She hesitates, the question too much like a weakness.  "You'll...come?"

"Do you want me to?"

There's a touch of exasperation in her reply, a flutter of life.  "Would I have asked if I didn't?"

"No.  No, I don't suppose you would."

"It's just...I think it might help.  To be here.  With you."

The silence on the line is nineteen years of conversations they should have had compressed into thirty seconds of heavy air.  She feels faint, sick, like she's on a clifftop as the rock crumbles beneath her feet, and she clings to words as if they're a lifeline.  "This whole place reminds me.  I haven't...I haven't really been outside.  But the air, Randall, the air smells the same as it used to, and if I close my eyes...."  She tails off.  "It's taken a lot of whiskey to sleep, even by my admittedly jaded standards.  It's like...turning back time."

Finally, he speaks.  "Without the bombs, I hope."

She laughs across the catch in her voice.  "Without the bombs."

"I'll be there tomorrow."  His voice is a promise, one she recognises from before (before Freddie, before Sofia, before the world came crashing down and made a glorious ruin of her life), and she believes him like she's never quite believed anything in nineteen years.

"The show-"

"Not on this week.  Extenuating circumstances.  Not that it matters."

"Okay."

This silence is different somehow.  Weightless.  

"Goodnight, Lix."

She smiles, closes her eyes.

The ghosts of the dead don't appear.


End file.
